Few Tune In During Speech : Wait-and-See Attitude Is Common in Moscow

To put it plainly, the reform will not work if it fails to become every person’s vital affair.

--Mikhail S. Gorbachev, speaking at Tuesday’s Communist Party conference.

Tanya Rebelskaya is all for Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his package of reforms.

As a member of a private enterprise cooperative selling high-priced souvenirs from a makeshift stand along the Arbat, Moscow’s trendy pedestrian zone, she is literally dependent for her livelihood on his success.

But like many of the 10 million people who live in the Soviet capital, she showed no pressing desire to catch her hero’s speech Tuesday as he opened the Communist Party’s first conference in nearly 50 years.

Yes, she knew it was being carried live on Soviet radio and television, and, yes, she had a portable radio, but she hadn’t bothered to bring it.

Western Celebrities

Rearranging her display of plastic buttons adorned variously with pictures of Madonna, Elvis Presley and the bywords of Gorbachev’s reforms, perestroika and glasnost (restructuring and openness), she said, “I’ll listen to the news tonight.”

Although the speech was widely trumpeted as a watershed event, as much for the future of Soviet society as for Gorbachev himself, Muscovites seemed content to await the final outcome rather than seize the chance to watch an unusual bit of play-by-play.

There were few transistor radios glued to Muscovite ears when Gorbachev warned that subsidies, which for decades have provided inexpensive milk and meat, will probably have to go.

Few clustered around television sets as the Soviet leader tossed out a variety of earth-shaking ideas, including placing restrictions on the role of the all-powerful Communist Party and reorganizing the government, or when he spoke candidly of the forces opposed to his reforms.

No one rushed up and asked, “Have you heard. . . ?”

The giant public television screen on Kalinina Prospekt was blank.

A reporter for the British news agency Reuters, looking for reaction to the speech, interviewed about 20 passers-by near the Kremlin. None had bothered to watch.

But many who were interested in the fast-moving political developments gathered outside the offices of the independent-minded Moscow News, reading display copies of an issue of the paper produced hours before Gorbachev began to speak.

It was much better, a group of men nodded in agreement, to read the papers later than to try to follow Gorbachev’s speech live.

“You need the analysis,” a government lawyer explained. “You need to know what others think.”

Too Soon to Talk

Another in the crowd, who had heard Gorbachev’s opening remarks before leaving for work, said, “It is neither correct nor polite to discuss an event that hasn’t yet finished.”

But if Muscovites seemed lukewarm to the events unfolding before them, no one was without an opinion of Gorbachev’s reforms. Questions asked around the city center quickly grew into mini-debates.

A pensioner, Ivan Orlov, who said he’d been a party member since 1945, declared that dictator Josef Stalin was responsible for the Soviet Union’s problems.

“They are the real martyrs,” he said, nodding toward a newspaper story about a family purged by Stalin in the 1930s.

A young architect quickly cut in, insisting that there were others in addition to Stalin who were guilty.

“It wasn’t just one man,” he said. “What we need is a multi-party system to limit the Communist Party.” He said the Communists should be the leading party but “only among other voices.”

The debating, which at times became emotional, eventually broke up on a lighter note as a lawyer complained that discussion of Gorbachev’s reforms was becoming excessive.

“Even when a young man meets a young woman and they want to make love, they talk of perestroika ,” he said. “It’s all going too far.”

A Reminder

But later, in the first cool of a long Moscow summer evening, there was a brief reminder that, for many, liberalization had not gone far enough.

A few hours after Gorbachev finished speaking at the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, the police cordoned off a main square less than a mile away. And then, according to witnesses, they manhandled a small group of people trying to address a gathering and pushed them into an unmarked van, which took them away.

Most of the crowd stayed and listened to other speakers as plainclothes police stood by and filmed the proceedings. The Democratic Union, a dissident group, had scheduled a demonstration in the square, but a police official said the group had no authorization to protest.